It is the year 2023. You are climbing into your Tesla Cybertruck to drive to your local small town “entrepreneur and bitcoin enthusiast” meetup event where you will get to listen to a business seminar lead by Pewdiepie. You turn on the Cybertruck self-driving capabilities and pull up some Dave Chappelle standup videos from YouTube onto the central console. As you laugh at his joke about there being so many genders now he can’t decide whether he believes in human rights, you get a notification on your phone.
You’ve just received your Freedom Dividend in your USA Blockchain Wallet. You’re now 2000 YangBucks richer which are worth $900 on Coinbase. Hey, at least they’re not worth $800 like last month. The Yang administration has been trying to curb the rate of inflation caused by the introduction of their UBI plan through new value added taxes and increasing the amount of YangBucks people receive which were originally pegged at the value of $1. You look back onto the road. Airpods are strewn all over the street. It’s too late. The Cybertruck careens back and forth until it tips over. You shed a tear at the thought you may die before ever playing with the new Pickle Rick skins on Fortnite you were going to buy with your YangBucks or share the newest Pepe meme you were making to your gaming clan.
Yang Gang the Blockchain
The Democratic primary election will elect the Democratic nominee to likely run against Donald Trump in the US general election this year. Andrew Yang is one of these nominees polling around 4% nationally. In short he’s a tech entrepreneur who sold a company and then used the money to fund Venture for America, an organization that tries to create the next Gates, Bezos, and Musks with a focus on parts of the country that have not fared well during the last 50 years of American Capitalism. He’s the guy you may have heard pushing for the “Freedom Dividend” or a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for all Americans of $1000 per month. His reasons for proposing such an idea is that technology will soon start displacing a large amount of workers due to automation and therefore the government can tax the use of robots to provide some financial relief in the form of $1000 per month.
He has a lot of policies on his site but preventing landlords from increasing rent to prevent inflation is not one of them
While he’s generally known as the UBI guy, in order to garner people’s attention, his campaign’s strategy has been to advocate for policies that will interest fans of very specific interests. For example, he has a plan for “Empowering MMA Fighters,” legalizing marijuana, legalizing online poker, and even a policy for regulating crypto assets and consumer protection. He’s been endorsed by an eclectic cast of celebrities and entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, Dave Chapelle, and Tommy Chong. His base (termed the Yang Gang) is made of people who believe in cursed slogans like “Human-Centered Capitalism,” “Not Left. Not Right. Forward.,” and hats with the word “MATH” on it. Anyone who has followed and is critical of Emmanuelle Macron’s presidency in France would also be very skeptical of his campaign’s messages. The class of people who seem to gravitate towards Yang the most are techies understandably worried about automation and NEETs who think playing video games is a personality.
Being by far the most vocally supportive candidate on cryptocurrency and blockchain, he has gained a lot of support from others in the space. Last year he even attended Consensus, the largest annual blockchain related conference in the world held in New York City.
As the first presidential candidate to attend the event, he gained some serious support from the crypto community
In order to give the country a UBI, Yang has stated that it would likely be facilitated by a blockchain and has even referenced that his plan for implementing modern time banking and even voting, could also be facilitated by blockchain. If you’re in Crypto World, this is a big opportunity for business and spreading the Crypto Gospel so it isn’t surprising that Yang Gangers would even be so inspired to start YangDAO a Decentralized Autonomous Organization on Ethereum dedicated to getting Yang elected for the US presidency. But not everyone in Crypto World are supportive of his proposed uses for blockchain.
One of the biggest issues for using blockchain for government programs revolves around identity. On a normal publicly open blockchain like bitcoin, not only can anyone make an identity but they can make as many as they want which creates the basis of Sybil Attacks. If the US government wanted to create an infrastructure for sending UBI payments, voting, or time banking credits, it would need to be able to accurately identify that the right person is receiving the funds or is controlling the account. While there are plenty of companies that are working to create decentralized identity solutions, there is not yet a clear winner or standard so it isn’t possible to say that Yang would be able to figure this out. Even cryptocurrency evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos is skeptical of blockchain identity solutions.
They’re creative I’ll give them that
Nation-states are not properly designed to handle decentralized technologies like blockchain yet because historically they depend on central institutions for issuing things like identity. It is not yet clear how you securely establish a comprehensive identity on the blockchain. Is it based on your recorded transactions? Will you need to have several people “verify” that you are who you say you are? How do you decide on these verifiers? Is it based on reviews of your trustworthiness on the blockchain? What happens if someone steals your private key? While I think solving the issue around decentralized identity is an important one and there will likely be several different solutions for proving, it is unlikely to think that the US government would figure it out when there isn’t even a system for national identity cards.
Yang brings some interesting points around technology to the public discourse, but he falls well short of showing that he has the technological competence around blockchain to implement these ideas. Considering his low polling this late into the race, there is very little reason to think that he will become the nominee, however I wouldn’t be surprised to find him in a Democratic president’s cabinet where he could have influence on technology. He likely has good intentions and it’s possible that he could bring about some positive technological reform, but Socialists should still remain skeptical of his politics.
So while I’m not against the idea of UBI, I am unequivocally against the Freedom Dividend which requires recipients of welfare or disability benefits to choose between their benefits or the $1000 per month instead of being additive. Also I know very few places where one can live in the US with just $1000 per month. It’s only extra that his plans for blockchain are not well thought out.
If we’re going to talk about how automation is going to kill jobs, instead of offering a measly UBI, we should be using it to point out the absurdity of capitalism that productivity would increase without human labor yet because people lose their jobs this isn’t a good thing because of market mechanisms
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